Today I'm going to take you on a homemade coconut oil journey, as promised. As you all probably know, coconut oil is better than those cheap and refined oils you can buy in the supermarket. Coconut oil is high in natural saturated fats. But this oil was unfairly demonized by the biased scientists or the greedy corporate world in hopes of brainwashing the masses about saturated fats. And of course, to make more money off you, since you don't have time or money to opt for natural products.
Now to make pure or virgin coconut oil, you can either wait for the coconuts to fall or you can just go the farmers' market and buy some old coconuts. These are quite good for oil extraction. I bought 2 coconuts for 50¢ each.
Back in the day, grandma will extract the coconut milk using her hands, there was no blender or anything. It was high effort but quite rewarding for her. I'm actually about to show you how to do it the old school way but the guys at the market told me that the price already includes squeezing the hell out of the coconuts. Not that I'm lazy but why should I say no to that? I'm pretty sure grandma would also be happier to know that it's a brave new world now in paradise.
First, the guy will grate the coconuts for me. It's part of the package!
Now I get pure coconut milk thanks to this high-powered little machine and the sweaty muscles of men. Now it's time to put all that liquid into a pan!
Cover the milk and keep it in the refrigerator for about 24 hours. Or until it becomes like this:
You can also save the water separated from the curd to add to some dish later. Place the curd or the cream in the pan and cook it on low to medium heat. Don't use the nonstick pan. You have to slowly extract the oil for about 1-2 hours. So you cannot be an impatient sucker with this.
I guess my mistake here was that I cooked it past the smoking point. I was waiting for it to turn yellow because I thought that oil should generally look like that. It turned out, not all whites are bad (except white sugar, corporate-looking white paper, white rice, etc...), white coconut oil is good. I just cannot use it for high temp. cooking. But still, I should have taken it out of the pan while it still looked like a cold-pressed pure virgin coconut oil. Cold-pressing means cooking the coconut oil slowly and not exceeding 50 Degree Celsius to preserve its healthful benefits
So yeah, it looks like I burned it, anyway it should not be so dark yellow. I waited until my house became an oven, not so good while experiencing this oppressive summer heat! I'm going to make another bottle of coconut oil next time, but at least now I learned from my mistake.
Anyway, you can use a funnel and cheesecloth to separate the oil from the charred bits. But hey, it was still amazing to be able to extract oil from coconuts or do this from scratch. So I guess this whole process was not so bad for starters. This is still oil by the way and it smells like coconut. Using coconut oil for cooking would be quite new to me, so maybe I can still use this for some dish that requires high temperature.